Cartographers of a Volcanic Ground: Pakistani Literature Now

Anja Kampmann is a Berlin-based poet and
novelist. She has published short stories and poems in many anthologies and
magazines including Akzente and Neue Rundschau, and isworking on a novel. In spring of 2011 she participated in the Karachi Literary Festival.

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Cartographers of a Volcanic Ground: Pakistani Writers TakeStock of Their Country’s Political
Developments

Early this year two high-ranking politicians were
killed in Pakistan because they made a case for religious tolerance. The
Karachi Literary Festival offered an opportunity for well-known writers to
discuss the direction in which their country is moving.

It isn’t easy to assess the political situation in
Pakistan these days. With the massive transformations going on in the Arabic
countries, the government of Pakistan seems more and more intimidated by the
growing extremist violence. The second Karachi Literary Festival, which took
place earlier this year, brought together over a hundred writers, most of them
from Pakistan. And while the event was taken to signal the strength of Pakistani
literature, it was also possible to see it as an exception [a suspended state]
in a context where the freedom of movement and speech of intellectuals is
threatened by ever growing constraints.

Triumph
of Fanaticism

The killing of the Punjab
province’s governor Salman Taseer on Jan 4, 2011 cast a frightening light on
the country’s power apparatus. Taseer had spoken openly against the blasphemy
laws, and against the death penalty for the Christian Aasia Bibi, who had been
accused of insulting Islam under questionable circumstances; in retaliation he
was killed by his 26-year-old bodyguard. The masses celebrated the killer as a
hero, and hundreds gathered in front of the Islamabad court building to demand
that his trial be cancelled.

In the intellectual
circles the killing came as a shock. The political scientist and renowned
Pakistan-expert Ahmed Rashid takes the public reaction to Taseer’s killing as a
proof of a “massive penetration of our society by extremist modes of thinking.”
Especially alarming was the silent acceptance of the killing by the population
at large. Not a single politician dared to speak out loud against the killing. Not
even the republic’s president, Asif Ali Zardari dared to attend Taseer’s
funeral out of fear for his own safety. Two months later, on March 2, 2011, came
the shooting of Shabhaz Bhatti while riding in his car. He had been the only
Christian Minister in Pakistan’s parliament. Like Salim Taseer he too fought
against the blasphemy laws installed by President Zia Ul-Haq and demanding the death
penalty for anyone insulting the prophet Mohammed. Sara Suleri Goodyear, writer
and professor at Yale University, had already stressed at the literary festival
in Karachi how important it was in such situations to keep up the discourse, to
make of these problems a central theme.” Above all I worry that we’ll get accustomed
to these horrible assassinations. Of course it’s possible to say that the
western media shouldn’t fixate on catastrophes whenever they write about
Pakistan, but let’s be honest: the catastrophe is here. We just mustn’t get
used to it.

The City and the Countryside

For Suleri the fear of
extremists is quite real. What once seemed self-evident is now out of the question.
This means little things, like going alone to the market, or walking home alone
in the evening. Edda Khan, a German who has lived in Karachi for 40 years,
notes these changes too: “We used to drive to the Indus for a Sunday outing but
not any more. And when we drive to the countryside, we now hardly ever leave
the main roads. Out there one can’t really speak of freedom of movement, and
not only in the political sense.”

The huge difference
between social structures in the cities and in the countryside is something
Danyall Muenuddin also attests to. He returned home a few years ago to take
care of a large country estate, and in his story collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders draws a
meticulous picture of rural Pakistan. “You can’t speak about Pakistan without
speaking about power structures, because it is so hierarchically organized,
especially in the countryside,“ comments Muenuddin. “So it is usually those
with the least power that keep finding new ways of sneaking around these structures
— women especially.”

Also the novelist H.M.
Naqvi, born in 1974, thinks it’s essential to take the country’s voices very
seriously. “In public discourse Pakistan appears to be defined by the upper
middle class, but it is also important to read the Sufi poetry from Sindh and
the Punjab. To understand this country you must take into account other ways of
telling stories than what appears in the newspapers.” And this is in particular
the assignment of Pakistani literature, which has lately been receiving
increased international attention.

Most of the writers are
keenly conscious of how dire the political situation is. Yet H. M. Naqvi
doesn’t believe an extremist takeover of the country is imminent. He has
confidence in the many independent initiatives that underscore people’s
engagement, such as the proliferation of schools in private homes. In his
opinion, the country’s mixed demography makes it simply too difficult to steer it
in one direction only. And yet one hears both anger and disappointment in his
voice: in his view, the consequence of the terrorist activities is not only
that Pakistan has been reduced in the eyes of the West to a place of extremist
violence; from a religious point of view they have also turned Islam itself into
a monolith.

The writer Mohsin Hamid,
three years older than Naqvi, makes another observation: a growing fear in the
public domain leads to ongoing self-censorship of the press and the media, as
well as in the way people comport themselves in public. Even if this censorship
is unconscious, the presence of a “pervasive pressure” that seems to rest on everything
is an alarming signal. Civic courage and the strength to hold up one’s own
position in public are being replaced by meandering and verbose discussions.

The
Silence of the Majority

The few cases where
Islamic authorities are challenged head-on have gained cult status. One example
is the case of Veena Malik. In the fall of 2010, while participating in “Big
Boss,” the Indian version of the reality show “Big Brother,” the Pakistani
actress started a very public affair with the Indian actor Ashmit Patel. On her
return to Pakistan the Mufti Abdul Muhammad Qawi accused her on TV of offending
“Pakistan and Islam” by her behavior. Malik’s irate response was followed, and euphorically
commented on, on Twitter and Facebook by hundreds of thousands of viewers: Veena
Malik positioned herself against Muhammad Qawi as at once a self-confident
woman and a devout Muslim. She had read the Koran and knew the limits it sets: thus,
she said, she never for example kissed Patel in public. “Mufti Sahib!,” her
outraged retort to the cleric, is cited as exemplary. But Veena Malik remains
an exception.

Mohsin Hamid describes
the current public discourse as an “empty arena.” With the exception of the 50-60
million daily users of the Internet: free information and the many aspects of
civil society can indeed survive in the virtual space. Yet, as the writer says,
the most important voices are those that are barely heard. “People must again find
courage to take a stand for their opinions and to make Pakistan into a country
that reflects their preferences.” A retreat into the virtual space is not a
solution. Literature, too, must deal with the questions otherwise asked only
too rarely in the open debates—such as whether the intense politicization of
religion leads at the same time to its hollowing-out. “The essential questions—around
end-of-life matters, or those addressing one’s place in a complex world—which have
traditionally belonged to the sphere of religion, are now being pushed to the
side, something that unsettles people deeply.” Much talk today is still about the
grand design of Pakistan in 1947. “This dream has a reality of its own, and it
now requires new responses.” The country’s development is only possible if
these contradictions are acknowledged and addressed.

Kamila Shamsie, whose novel
Burned Shadow appeared last year, also
refuses to recognize one-sided perspectives. “Half of my family lives in India,
while I was raised in Pakistan, where we were taught to see India as the enemy.”
Her novels set out to outline, in order to dissolve, the polarizations arising
out of wars and extremist movements. “My characters never fit inside one group
only; the inevitable question become, what is then left for them?” Shamsie’s
figures are caught in the wheels of history, driven by decisions others have
made for them, forced to break up and leave their lives behind—“always, of
course, a deeply painful process.” Showing individual complicated stories in
the midst of universal events, such as the atom bomb over Nagasaki, the founding
of Pakistan, or America’s deployment in Iraq—this is Shamsie’s countermove against
the simplification of history.

Irony is instead the
preferred mode of Mohammed Hanif as he responds to the system that shaped the
world of his childhood. In the 1980s, under the totalitarian regime of the
military dictator Zia Ul-Haq, Hanif observed how people mimicked the dictator’s
speech, his weaknesses, his body language: in this way satire made the despot into
a person with the same petty needs as everybody else. Though he was for years a
correspondent for CNN, the author prefers comedy shows over news: “They are
becoming more and more popular, because they are more tuned in to the pressures
in society than other shows.” His novel A
Case of Exploding Mangoes is precisely a satire, describing with bitter
fury the corrupt system under Zia ul-Haq, and his end in a plane crash on
August 17, 1988.

Optimism as a Show of Strength

I follow along with H.M.
Naqvi while he does research for his new novel. He is looking at minority
communities: we visit a Hindu temple close to the harbor, then the ancient
Zoroastrian neighborhood, and finally the Catholic seminary St. Pius X Minor,
directed by Father Benjamin Shahzad. Under his supervision, ten young men have
started their training for Catholic priesthood in the heart of Karachi. There
is a small prayer room; a statue of Virgin Mary, lit blue, stands among the flower
pots in the garden. Father Shahzad seems happy about his task. His communities
are small but strong, he has barely any problems with Muslim groups. Of course,
one must be cautious. The young men whom he instructs come from Karachi or
smaller villages in the countryside. The optimism he exudes does not seem
staged. Yet the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, barely two weeks after our
conversation, makes his attitude seem something of a feat, if an honest and
well-intentioned one. Threatened by extremists, Bhatti had shortly before his
death requested a bulletproof car.

“I'm beyond the point where I'm simply enraged,” says Sara Suleri
Goodyear. “But I know many who have been overcome by a deep tiredness. The fact
that we have begun to be blunted into indifference by these events really is not
good at all.” In her stories she summons the Lahore of her childhood, the ties
to her family and to the places where she grew up, but also her incomprehension
in the face of the murder of her sister Ifat.
“I write about the women who I have loved. In literature we must move
beyond the point when death is only followed by grief. No. We must celebrate,
must remember, convert elegy into something affirmative.” Daniyal Mueenuddin, on the other hand, points
to the fragile ground, on which rests this celebration of literature—and thus
also the Karachi festival, comparing the subliminal tension in Pakistan with that
of the Weimar Republic: “We dance and dance, yet feel it might come to an end
at any moment.”

This piece appeared originally
in Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 4. April, 2011.